Changes coming to the Herald

By KARI BORGEN Baker City Herald May 05, 2009 12:00 am

Effective June 1, the Baker City Herald will change our publication
dates from five days to three days a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and
Fridays. Our doors will continue to be open for business five days a
week, and we will continue to be a daily news organization, publishing
news to the Web every day at www.bakercityherald.com. But we won’t be
printing a newspaper on Tuesday or Thursday.

The same staff of reporters and photographers will be putting their resources into expanded health and business coverage Mondays, along with our regular weekend and sports coverage. Home and Garden features, with food and regular milestones announcements, will publish on Wednesdays and expanded weekend previews, recreation and real estate features come out on Fridays.

We remain committed to covering local business, government, events and sports, and providing our readers with timely coverage of breaking news through our Web site.

You will receive all of the local news that we have been publishing in five issues, but it will be delivered to you in three.

Our priority is to maintain our level of service to our customers and our community, which means keeping the people working at the Baker City Herald working — on local news stories every day, answering your calls and questions, producing advertising for local businesses and publishing community projects like the Visitors Guide.

We also think it is important to keep our subscription price affordable. You are still paying $7.75 a month for your carrier delivered Baker City Herald subscription, the same price as in 1997. Our subscribers will pay the same monthly rate as they have for the last 12 years, and will receive three issues instead of five. The price for the newspaper on the rack and in stores will be 75 cents.

We aren’t alone in deciding to allocate our resources to fewer, better issues. Newspapers in Klamath Falls, Pendleton, McMinnville and Ontario, to name just a few in Oregon alone, have curtailed publishing days. Our colleagues at our sister paper, The Observer in La Grande, will be discontinuing their Saturday issue.

Fortunately, community newspapers have remained viable in the areas they serve because we focus on local news for local readers. Although our print schedule will change, our purpose remains the same as it has for the last 139 years — a commitment to timely local news and information for our readers and our community.

In the weeks leading up to our June 1 publication schedule change we’ll be addressing your questions and concerns in columns on our pages. Please feel free to write to me with yours at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
, or mail to P.O. Box 807, Baker City, OR 97814. I look forward to hearing from you.